“There’s an old expression,” Mamey tells me. “‘Daughtering out.’ Do you know what it means?”
I shake my head.
“It means no male heirs survived to carry on the family name. Your mother is the last of the Cushing Hathorns. When she dies, the Hathorn name will die with her.”
“There’s still Hathorn Point.”
“Yes, that’s true. But this is no longer Hathorn House, is it? Now it’s the Olson House. Named for a Swedish sailor six years younger than your mother.”
My mind is reeling. “Wait—Papa is younger than Mother?”
“You didn’t know that?” When I shake my head again, Mamey laughs. “There’s a lot you don’t know, child. Johan Olauson was his name then.” I mouth the strange words: Yo-han Oh-laow-sun. “Barely spoke a word of English. He was a deckhand on a schooner captained by John Maloney, who lives in that little house down yonder with his wife,” she says, gesturing toward the window. “You know who I’m talking about?”
I nod. The captain is a friendly man with a bushy gray mustache and yellow-corn teeth and his wife is a ruddy, broad-faced woman with a bosom that seems of a piece with her middle. I’ve seen his boat in the cove: The Silver Spray.
“Well, it was February. Eighteen ninety—a bad winter. Endless. They were on their way to Thomaston from New York, delivering fuel wood and coal to lime kilns up there. But when they reached Muscongus Bay and dropped anchor, a storm swept in. It was so cold that ice grew around the ship in the night. There was nothing they could do; they were stranded. After a few days, when the ice was thick enough, they got out and walked across it to shore. This shore. Your father had nowhere to go, so he stayed with Maloney and his wife until the thaw.”
“How long was that?”
“Oh, months.”
“And the boat was just out there in the ice the whole time?”
“All winter long,” she says. “You could see it from this window.” She lifts her chin toward the pantry. I can faintly hear the clatter of dishes on the other side of the door. “Well, there he was, in that little cottage all winter, down near the cove, with a clear view of this house up the hill. He must’ve been bored to death. But he’d learned how to knit in Sweden. He made that blue wool blanket in the parlor while he was staying with them, did you know that?”
“No.”
“He did, sitting around the hearth with the Maloneys every night. Anyway, you know how people are: they talk, they tell stories—and oh, those Maloneys like to gossip. They would’ve told him, no doubt, about how this house was on the verge of daughtering out, and that if Katie married, her husband would inherit the whole thing. I don’t know for sure, of course; I can only guess what was said. But he’d been here just a week when he decided he was going to learn English. He walked into town and asked Mrs. Crowley at the Wing School to teach him.”
“My teacher, Mrs. Crowley?”
“Yes, she was the teacher even then. He went to the schoolhouse every day for lessons. And before the ice thawed, he’d changed his name to John Olson. Then, one day, he made his way up through the field to this house and knocked on the front door, and your mother answered. And that was it. Within a year Captain Sam died and your parents were married. Hathorn House became the Olson House. All of this”—she raises her arms in the air like a music conductor—“was his.”
I picture my father sitting with the Maloneys in their cozy cottage, knitting that blanket while they regale him with stories about the white house in the distance: how three Hathorns bestowed their new name on this spit of land, and one built this very house … the spinster daughter who lives there now with her parents, their three sons dead, no heir to carry on the family name …
“Do you think Papa was … in love with Mother?” I ask.
Mamey pats my hand. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But here’s the truth, Christina. There are many ways to love and be loved. Whatever led your father here, this is his life now.”
I WANT MORE than anything for Papa to be proud of me, but he has little reason. For one thing, I am a girl. Even worse—I know this already, though no one’s ever actually said it to me—I am not beautiful. When no one is around, I sometimes inspect my features in a small cloudy fragment of mirror that’s propped against the windowsill in the pantry. Small gray eyes, one bigger than the other; a long pointy nose; thin lips. “It was your mother’s beauty that drew me,” Papa always says, and though I know now that’s only part of the story, there’s no question that she is beautiful. High cheekbones, elegant neck, narrow hands and fingers. In her presence I feel ungainly, a waddling duck to her swan.
On top of that, there’s my infirmity. When we’re around other people, Papa is tense and irritable, afraid that I’ll stumble, knock into someone, embarrass him. My lack of grace annoys him. He is always muttering about a cure. He thinks I should’ve kept the leg braces on; the pain, he says, would’ve been worth it. But he has no idea what it was like. I would rather suffer for the rest of my life with twisted legs than endure such agony again.
His shame makes me defiant. I don’t care that I make him uncomfortable. Mother says it would be better if I weren’t so willful and proud. But my pride is all I have.
One afternoon when I am in the kitchen, shelling peas, I hear my parents talking in the foyer. “Will she have to stay there alone?” Mother asks, her voice threaded with worry. “She’s only seven years old, John.”
“I don’t know.”
“What will they do to her?”
“We won’t know until she’s looked at,” Papa says.
A finger of fear runs down my back.
“How will we afford it?”
“I’ll sell a cow, if I must.”
I hobble toward them from the pantry. “I don’t want to go.”
“You don’t even know what—” Papa starts.
“Dr. Heald already tried. There’s nothing they can do.”
He sighs. “I know you’re afraid, Christina, but you have to be brave.”
“I’m not going.”
“That’s enough. It’s not up to you,” Mother snaps. “You’ll do as you’re told.”
The next morning, as dawn is beginning to seep through the windows, I feel a rough push on my shoulder, a shake. It takes a moment to focus, and then I am staring into my father’s eyes.
“Get dressed,” he says. “It’s time.”
I feel the soft shifting weight and dull warmth of the hot water bottle against my feet, like the belly of a puppy. “I don’t want to, Papa.”
“It’s arranged. You know that. You’re coming with me,” he says in a firm quiet voice.
It’s cold and still mostly dark when Papa lifts me into the buggy. He wraps the blue wool blanket he knitted around me and then two more, adjusts a cushion behind my head. The buggy smells of old leather and damp horse. Papa’s favorite stallion, Blackie, stamps and whinnies, tossing his long mane, as Papa adjusts his harness.
Papa climbs into the driver’s seat, lights his pipe and flicks the reins, and we set off down the hard-packed dirt road, the buggy squeaking as we go. The jostling hurts my joints, but soon enough I adjust to the